Mailing List

Friday, June 26, 2015

Greetings all,
I am going to make an active effort to keep this blog up to date. I am going to include download updates of the game on Google Play, reviews and feedback, and progress on the iOS release and new things coming for the Android version:

Install update on Burgal's Bounty:
Total Installs as of 6/24: 663
Total Current Installs as of 6/24: 254
Daily Active Users ~ 20 to 30
Total Production Revenue to Date since June 5th (Ads only): $5.59

Plans for new features and enhancements for iOS release and Android version:
1. Better tutorials and reorganizing of level
- This is to help new users stay engaged
2. Social Media
- You will be able to share your scores on Facebook and Twitter!
3. Certain UX changes to improve the experience for the Android and iOS versions.

Progress on iOS version (It has been a little slow):
1. All code that related to updating game save data has been ported from Java successfully.
2. Screen will scale to appropriate resolution and you can interact with the UI components on the title screen so far.
3. All Android Assets have been imported and set up to be used in Unity (XML, pngs, etc).

Other random stuff:
I attended an event put on by Playcrafting about User Acquisition. Unfortunately it did not help a lot with advice for indie developers without a UA budget. The best advice we received was to organically get downloads without a budget. So far, Phat Games has spent approximately $600 on UA which is peanuts compared to industry studios. Advertising with the game trailer on Chartboost has provided us with about 400 downloads, but low retention. Organic is slowest, but has the highest retention. Paid UA has very low retention rates. After about a month, 70% of your users have uninstalled your app if your app is freemium. It sounds daunting, but it is what it is. Ultimately, as an Indie developer if you want to make it, you simply need to keep trying to find dynamics that work, and keep plugging away. It is exceedingly difficult, but also very rewarding. The indie game community is also getting very large. There is a lot of saturation in the market space, but there is there is huge projected growth in the mobile space and game space overall. Quality of the game is important. If you do not have a good game in the app store, then making it at all is pretty much impossible. Wish Phat Games luck as we keep plugging away!

Thursday, June 18, 2015

Burgal's Bounty is now live on Google Play! Please go and download it and support Phat Games so we can get the iOS release done and make plenty of other games for you in the future!

Here are some post go-live statistics and info that may help others in the future.
The game launched on June 5th. That day through our own organic social networks we got approximately 50 downloads.
We also launched Facebook advertising. We spent approximately $120 USD on this to see how successful it would be changing up the target markets.

Brazil and Taiwan were our most engaged audiences. Over 38,000 people around the world watched the trailer attached with the download link. 200,000 people worldwide saw the post. We got approximately 10 downloads from Brazil and France. The facebook page actually did the best. We received 15 more page likes as a result of this small campaign.

Downloads ranged from 2 to 5 organically a day without doing anything. We made a number of tweaks to the game description on Google Play using our main keywords up to five times in the description. You may also notice Burgal's Bounty on Google Play is called Burgal's Bounty (Puzzle Mazes). This is all to hep with our App Store Optimization (AOS).

We experienced an uninstall rate of approximately 12% in our first week which is about average. We encountered some issues with older phones where the game ran out of memory and we quickly deployed fixes to address this but that primarily did drive our uninstalls.

Our biggest download day since go live was then our showing at FlameCon. This got us approximately 20 downloads. There were also a lot of uninstalls afterwards. It did expose Phat Games to numerous people, and we established a mailing list which we will use to inform users about the launch party and the iOS release.

On Tuesday of this last week we launched video ad campaign on ChartBoost that last two days and cost approximately $220 dollars (we could have made it higher, but we capped it at $100 a day with a chance of slight overage in our budget). This campaign was seen by over 20,000 people on their phones while playing other games. We received approximately 200 downloads and kept engagement at it's highest rate since go live at least so far. It is only the first day since the campaign ended. A couple minor enhancements to the game will be made to keep user engagement and a new release will be deployed.

Here are our stats as of 13 days post go live:
Total downloads (due to delays on Google Play right now we do not have a precise number reported from Google - this number is coming from one of our ad networks, Vungle): 330
Total uninstalls (only an estimate): 80. This is high. I am not sure why as the crashes did not impact this many users.
Total revenue so far since go live: $2.49 (ad revenue only. No in app purchases have been made).

Honestly. I do not know if this is good. If anyone reads this blog who has industry experience with taking a free indie mobile game live, I would love to hear feedback.